


White Christmas

by QueenRiza



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Presents, College Student Adam Parrish, Holidays, M/M, Post-Canon, TRC Exchange, TRC exchange 2017, The Barns (Raven Cycle), Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-17 05:51:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13070454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenRiza/pseuds/QueenRiza
Summary: Adam visits the Barns to find home in places he had nearly forgotten.





	White Christmas

**Author's Note:**

> This is my TRC Exchange fic for inkandowl! I hope you enjoy it and happy holidays! Disclaimer for everyone that I’ve only been to the East Coast once in my life and, despite some research I did for this fic, I have very little idea of what the weather is actually like in different areas, so my apologies in advance.

When Adam got out of the car, the first thing he noticed was the warmth. He had been progressively noticing it to a greater and greater degree as the BMW made its way down from Massachusetts to Virginia, but the warmth of a December in the American South hit him like a lukewarm, vaguely disappointing blanket as he swung the car door open.

Of course, these were the winters of his childhood, and he had never questioned them their dustiness, the occasional sprinkling of ice crystals that initially settled like finely powdered sugar, but would soon slop into a thick blanket of mud. He felt spoiled by Harvard now, and in more ways than one.

He'd found he liked the biting crispness of the weather, the soft sheets of snow gathered atop aged cobbled streets, the blazing fireplace in a friend's apartment.

"Of course I'm coming down," he'd told Ronan over the phone when Ronan had hesitantly (Ronan hated phones because it stripped his communication to voice alone, but Adam found himself still able to read every hopeful flicker of the eyes, every defensive posture, through arching sound waves transmitted through frozen air and thin straight telephone lines) suggested that he and Opal come up to visit Adam this year.

It had been unthinkable—the idea of corralling Opal into a car ride that long was nightmarish at best and it would only be Ronan's second Christmas in the Barns since reclaiming his home—so Adam was struck by the fact that Ronan had chosen to think it anyway.

Besides that, Ronan had already come up for Thanksgiving a month earlier, a blissful 48 hours of roaming Boston with the intent of checking out some of the tourist traps, but had devolved into making out in Adam's otherwise vacated dorm room and eating shitty Chinese food. It had been the best spent holiday Adam could remember.

He pulled open the BMW's trunk, retrieving one of his two slim suitcases. ("See! He knows how to pack lightly," his roommate's mother had said of him when he's first arrived at school, with a well-meaning smile made blaringly stupid by context. "Trevor nearly tried to stuff the entire house into our car.") Ronan grabbed the other and jostled Adam with the side of his torso, mouth pulled into the same smirk of a little boy who has successfully teased his crush.

"Asshole," Adam muttered, and kissed him.

It was warm, and he hated it. How desperately he had missed the Barns, missed Ronan, during his loneliest moments at school, but he still found himself wishing that the two homes he had chosen for himself could exist in convergence.

"Gansey called a little before you got to Boston," Adam said. Ronan didn't look offended that Gansey hadn't called him as well; instead, he looked a bit pleased his desire to keep phone communication to a minimum had been respected. But, despite Ronan's hatred of all things wired or mobile, Adam also knew that he still talked with Gansey at least once a week. Adam might have taken the position of the official messenger of necessary information between the two of them, but there were some bonds that went beyond that. "Apparently it's snowing in Nebraska so they're not flying in after all."

"Staying in for an exotic Midwestern Christmas?" Ronan said.

"Exactly." For reasons neither Adam or Ronan could totally understand, Gansey, Blue, and Henry had been determined to hit every single one of the 50 states and seemed to be moving through the country in an elongated, inefficient zig-zag, prone to conflict between Gansey's carefully thought out mapping and Henry's tendency to insist on turning down every interesting looking street.

Ronan made a subtle sort of noise somewhere in between an exaggerated snort and an articulated  _hmmph!_ "Assholes," he said mildly.

Adam gave an amused smile in passing agreement. "So it's just us." And the Barns felt a little bit emptier.

"And Opal," Ronan said.

"She was implied in the 'us'. Where is she anyway?" By now, Adam normally would have expected her to have run out to show him at least three different rocks and discarded tin cans that she had found around the Barns and determined very precious and interesting, and refuse to help bring anything back into the farm house. The said rocks and tin cans were normally chosen over the actual powerful and magical artifacts that Adam sometimes found during his own walks among the Barns, but, he supposed when you had lived your entire life in a dream, mundanity seemed much more surreal than magic.

"At Fox Way. Didn't want to come back to find out that she destroyed half of the barns," Ronan said with a faint smile that suggested that he might have been a little proud of her if that had been the case. He flicked a piece of lint off of the shoulder of Adam's jacket as he opened the door. "I was going to drive by and pick her up later today after we get you moved back in."

"I'm only here for two weeks," he said. "There isn't that much to move in." Really, it was closer to one and a half, because Adam had to be back in Boston to interview for a research internship before New Year's. He didn't mention that, though. Ronan had gone weirdly silent when he had told him about it over the phone and then managed a gruff "Well I guess that's important then, right?" when Adam had pushed him for a response.

He couldn't understand. It would only betray a lack of understanding of Ronan for Adam to expect him to really get it. But he was  _trying_  to get it, and pretending that he did, even in failure, and that was what made the difference, that was what said everything that Adam was hoping to hear.

A week and a half wasn't enough though, and he felt the loss of those few days and superfluous hours as keenly as Ronan did.

The Barns looked much as they had when he had left them in August. He didn't know whether to be surprised or not, to be comforted by the timelessness of this place or impressed that anything that inhabited a creature as volatile as Ronan Lynch had managed to stay in such perfect stasis.

He leaned his suitcase against a couch. "I got you a present, you know. For Christmas."

Ronan observed Adam in a slow, engulfing way that would have infuriated him had it been anyone else, but instead sent guilty warm shivers of anticipation down his spine. "Shit, Parrish," he said. "Didn't take you for a liar."

He said this because Adam had been very adamant up to this point about not exchanging gifts, as he had been the year before and the year before that. The first year, this had resulted in a Yuletide argument with Gansey, probably still their most impressive one to date, and one of their earliest. Last year, he had decided, after much internal conflict, not to put up a protest when the checks had been hastily brushed over during a December group dinner, but still, they had agreed that there would be no formal gift giving.

He'd broken this rule though. He couldn't quite say why, although it lingered somewhere in the back of this throat, the idea that he was really just being fair, that Ronan had already given him a home, a place to come back to, given him things Adam had never imagined, in his wildest and most hopeful longings, that he might have. It was paying back a gift Adam had been receiving for over a year. He thought he might spend the rest of his life trying to repay that and every moment of it would have been worth it.

He smirked. "Surprised?" He pulled the small box from his bag and tossed it at Ronan, who snatched it easily from the air.

Ronan examined it in its perch between his steady fingers, brow tilted with slight curiosity.

"Open it," Adam said, taking off his jacket. It was still too warm.

For a fraction of a moment, Ronan almost looked startled, with a sort of childish innocence that made Adam laugh. "It's not Christmas," he said defensively. " _Some_  of us like to keep tradition, Parrish."

Adam smiled, though he tried not to, because he knew Ronan would probably interpret it as him making fun of him when rather, he was just completely, ridiculously, hopelessly, blissfully in love with him. He caught Ronan's eye. He knew.

"It's not that big of a deal," Adam said, a tad self-consciously. "Not exactly worth the wait."

Ronan snorted dismissively. "Don't be stupid." He tore off the wrapping.

"See?" Adam idly pressed his hands against the sides of his jeans, flipping them over to their backs. "I told you, it's not that—"

Ronan held the bracelets up the light admiringly. They were unlike the leather ones he kept always around his wrists, but Adam had thought they still suited them oddly.

"Sick," Ronan said, tying them between two of his leather bands. "Did you make these?"

Adam flushed. He had. His roommate's girlfriend, who ran a hobby Etsy craft business, had shown him how to make them, which had seemed fun at first but now worried him as seeming embarrassingly cheap and childish.

Ronan grabbed his wrist, pulling Adam into his chest. It was warm there too, but a kind that Adam couldn't seem to mind. "That's great," he said sincerely. "That's really cool."

Adam laughed. "Okay, now you're  _definitely_ just saying that."

"No I'm not. I don't lie, remember? Unlike  _some_ people. These are the fucking greatest things I've ever seen."

"That you've  _ever seen_?" Adam said, amused,

"Fuck yeah. Take my word for it."

Adam kissed him then and it was warm and breathy and sturdy, Ronan's weight against his.

"I got you something too, you know," Ronan said a few moments later, when they had pulled apart.

Adam opened his mouth to object, but hesitantly closed it. He supposed he wasn't really in any kind of place to expect Ronan to follow the rules he hadn't adhered to either.

"And I didn't spend anything on it, so technically I didn't break any rules," Ronan said, with more than a small amount of ridiculous pride.

"Was that one of the rules?" Adam said dryly. "Did we have rules? I thought it was more of an agreed upon general spirit of anti-giving that we both abandoned." Besides, when you could magically pull objects from your mind, Adam wasn't quite sure where exactly the line was drawn between "purchased" and "homemade".

Ronan smirked and grabbed his hand, pulling him outside through the front door. Adam expected him to take him to one of the many scattered barns, still piled with assortments of otherworldly souvenirs accumulated through two generations of dreaming, but instead he stopped halfway out into the main yard. He fished through his pocket and placed something into Adam's hand.

"No wrapping?" Adam said, feigning disappointment.

"Don't get so hung up on appearances."

Adam peered at the object, squinting to make out its details. He was holding what appeared to be the smallest snow globe he had ever seen, no more than an inch all ways around. If he peered closely enough, he could just make out a tiny model of some of the main buildings the Harvard campus, with an even tinier model of himself among them.

He laughed despite himself. It felt weirdly tender.

"I love it," he said honestly. "Why did I have to go outside?"

Ronan shook his head, cupping Adam's hand in his. "Shake it."

He did so and at first nothing happened; he raised a questioning eyebrow at Ronan, vaguely wondering if this was a weird joke. But he shook it again, and as he watched the snow inside the globe gather to fall in watery suspended illusion, he felt something soft and cold against his cheek. He touched it self-consciously, feeling the melting between his fingers, until he felt it again, this time on the very tip of his nose.

His head tilted slowly upward, the hand clutching the globe falling to the side of his body, and he watched a descending sprinkling of white patter aimlessly against the green of the Barns.

He looked to Ronan. He was laughing, snowflakes meeting his bare shoulders to soon turn to liquid drops, but already, Adam could feel the air grow colder.

"You  _asshole_ ," he said, laughing a little helplessly at the wonder of it all. "You complete and total asshole. Are you really giving me  _snow_?"

"Is it as good as Massachusetts?" Ronan said.

Adam kissed him again, selfishly, wonderingly. It was getting even chillier now and he was beginning to realize that he had not packed for this sort of weather, no matter how temporary it was. But it hardly seemed like an issue now; his beating heart was a furnace in itself. "Are you kidding?" he said. "That was never going to even compare."


End file.
